Why So Many Old People Are Stupid

June 6, 2004

In Japan, seniority is a big deal. If someone is even a few years older, you are supposed to address him respectfully. That never jived with me when I was living in Japan. Do we automatically become respectable as we get older? I didn’t think so, but whenever I mentioned this to adults, they would always tell me that I would understand it someday when I too am older. Well, I’m older now (37), and I can tell you that so far I haven’t been proven wrong. I am beginning to be convinced that those adults were full of it.

Have you ever wondered why so many seniors are so stupid? Have you ever wondered why most people cannot relate to their parents when describing what they do in their lives? People often say, “But my parents would never understand that.” This becomes especially problematic when the topic is highly cultural like art, philosophy, and science. If you think about it logically, why should this be the case? If your father is 60 years old and if you are 30, then you would think he would be twice as wise and knowledgeable as you are, but this is rarely the case. Even if I am not qualified to judge people older than I am, I can tell you that among the people of my own age, some of them are already getting dumber than they were before.

The most common explanation is that, as you get older, it becomes harder to learn new things. Well, nice excuse. Even though it is very rare, I do meet seniors who are literally twice as wise and knowledgeable as I am. They are usually people who pursue something other than their jobs.

It appears that while some people progressively become wiser and more knowledgeable, the vast majority of others become progressively dumber. The gap between them must be huge. For those who kept improving themselves, the rest of the people of their own age must appear completely foreign to them, like talking to teenagers. So, why does this happen? And, when does this start happening? I think it starts happening in our 30s. Why it happens is a more complicated story.

In our 20s, we are all idealistic. There is nothing wrong with idealism, except that, in our 20s, we are idealistic and naive at the same time. In other words, our heads are running far ahead of our emotions. We can deal well with logical problems in our lives, but more complex emotional problems are beyond our abilities. This starts to flip in our 30s. As we start to lose our logical abilities, our emotions continue to mature, but the problem is that emotional maturity devoid of logical intelligence is no better than having a big head and a small heart. On top of losing logical abilities, we also lose physical abilities too; so the odds are against us. Furthermore, if you have a problem with substance abuse like alcoholism, it would hinder even your emotional maturity. So, all three components start to deteriorate. If you keep going in that direction for 30 years, the result is an utterly dumb, boring senior citizen.

In order to prevent this from happening, we must make a conscious effort to keep our minds and bodies in best shape possible. Our emotions will keep on maturing as long as we face our lives courageously. Even though our logical and physical abilities are diminishing, as we become wiser, we become much more efficient in learning. We no longer make obvious mistakes, and nothing we learn is entirely new. Our knowledge from other areas can expedite our learning process. These advantages can easily make up for the disadvantages, and it becomes possible to actually be twice as wise and knowledgeable as a 30 year old when we turn 60.

When I was in 7th grade, my math teacher answered an obvious but difficult question: Why do we have to study advanced math, if we are never going to use it in our adult lives? He said it’s because the same parts of our brains used for math can be used for many other things in life. With this short explanation, he utterly convinced me the importance of studying math, and of any other subjects for that matter.

The same logic still applies in our old age. Any connections in our brains left unused will eventually fall apart. Seemingly unrelated and irrelevant subjects like calculus could reinforce these unused connections. The science shows that the connections we frequently use can stay strong all our lives, and the aspects of our intelligence that use those parts of our brains could stay razor-sharp even in our old age.

But all this still does not explain why some choose to improve themselves while others let it all go down hill. I actually have no answer for that. All I can tell you is that, in our 30s, we all seem to come to some conclusions about what life is. Having reached our physical and logical heights of our lives in our late 20s, we can now see the entire mountain in perspective. We can even see the other side of that mountain (senior homes in Florida). This understanding of life is unspeakable and different for everyone. Some then decide that life is about comfort. They strive only to have a good life, eat good food, travel to exotic places, have happy relationships, live in comfortable houses, etc.. They maintain only the parts of their brains that are necessary to improve their comfort levels, that is, the skills required for their jobs.

Others decide that there is more to life than being comfortable. They realize that a higher understanding of life is always possible, that there is in fact more to that mountain than what we see in perspective. The meaning of life, for these people, becomes sheer curiosity about life. I already see people around me taking these two separate paths. The longer the time passes, the more difficult it becomes to relate to those who took the other path, but we meet more new people along the way, who happen to come across your path from entirely different directions.

Now I see why those adults insisted that older people are respectable. Being concerned only with comfort, they just gave me an answer that would make them more comfortable.

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Against Branding — Design and Conflict on Design Observer raises an interesting question but is not argued well. With his critique of Amnesty International posters, his issue appears to be consistency or homogeneity of the looks. He says, “While I’m not claiming that there’s no room for consistency in visual identity design, isn’t the uncritical application of any communications methodology asking for trouble?”

If consistency per se is not the problem, he needs to explain why the rebranded versions are “uncritical.” He fails to explain the relationship between consistency and lack of critical analysis. They are not necessarily related. As a branding strategy, it’s possible to deliberately employ inconsistency while being uncritical, and it’s also possible to be consistent while being critical.

His bigger issue appears to be the socio-economic class. Unfortunately here too, he doesn’t explain how exactly branding contributes or perpetuates the problem. The mechanism is not at all clear in his arguments.

For instance, he uses São Paulo as proof that “removing these signs helped reveal the stark poverty of the favelas (urban slums).” But how? He doesn’t explain. In fact, his claim goes counter to his quoting of Barthes. Barthes’ point isn’t that “myths” veil or hide “class division”, but that they normalize it. That is, manipulative branding or advertising can turn a problem into an identity to be embraced. It does not veil or hide “the stark poverty”; it presents the poverty ubiquitously in order to normalize it. It does the opposite of veiling.

In this sense, the aspect of Donald Trump’s branding that needs a critical analysis is not his vodka but his use of baseball caps during the presidential campaign. Baseball cap is a symbol of the rural working class. The 1-percenters like Trump do not wear baseball caps. It was part of the effort to turn the socio-economic plight into an identity, to normalize the income inequality. This is where Barthes’ analysis of myth becomes relevant.

Between the branding strategies used by Trump and Clinton, the latter was decidedly more “corporate.” Take a look at Trump’s baseball cap; it’s decidedly un-corporate. It’s set in a generic serif font and is barely designed. But I would bet that it was a strategic decision NOT to design it well, to keep it looking lowbrow. Clinton’s branding, designed by Pentagram’s Michael Bierut, was much more corporate, but its sophistication is also a signifier for the urban elitism that the rural working class detests. Trump’s campaign understood this, and Clinton’s didn’t. In one interview I saw, Michael Moore said he suggested making baseball caps to Clinton’s campaign early on but they ridiculed his idea. He said he realized how out of touch they were with the rural working class then.

What this tells us is that whether your branding campaign looks consistent and corporate has nothing to do with whether you are being critical. Clinton’s campaign was out of touch with the people they claim to fight for. If they are not even aware of their plights, how could they be critical in the first place? Trump’s campaign was at least in touch with their people, and knew how to exploit it using deliberately unsophisticated, un-corporate branding strategies.

For most people, “Daily Affirmation with Stuart Smalley” is what Facebook is. It’s a system to receive daily affirmations, to confirm their own biases, to congratulate one another. It’s not a platform where you challenge the ideas of others and others challenge yours. It’s not a peer review system.

Given what we have learned since the election, I’m now willing to say that Trump is preferable to Clinton (as Zizek declared before the election). It’s a high cost but it’s better than eight more years of oppressing the rural working class and suppressing their anger and despair. The outcome of that after eight more years would have been a lot worse.

I saw the problem before the election but had no clue how bad it was. When I wrote the articles explaining why the rural working class would vote for Trump, I was shocked by the reactions I received from my friends. They did not see it at all. Not only that; they became angry at me for writing them. In other words, the Left’s unawareness of the problem was not just lack of curiosity or a result of living in a bubble; it was ideological ignorance. That is, they felt they SHOULD ignore the plight of the rural working class. It was an ideological war against the rural values. Clinton’s use of the word “deplorables” is reflective of this. Had Clinton been elected, this war, which the Left was dominating, would have continued for another eight years. The problem Richard Rorty saw in the 90s would have devasted the entire middle class by then, both rural and urban. It would have been everyone’s problem, except for the top 0.1%.

The key contributing factor, which was not often talked about in this election cycle, is the speed of the technological evolution. The reason why startups are so popular is because technology is super-effective and efficient in amassing the wealth for the very few. Its ability to “scale” the profit without raising the cost is almost infinite. The first group of people to see the consequences of this scary efficiency was the rural whites. Those in the lower class, I don’t think, saw the decline because they were already at the bottom, as low as anyone could go without dying.

The income disparity is the biggest problem we are seeing globally. All the other problems we are seeing, like racism and xenophobia, are merely the symptoms of this main problem. Fighting racism is like taking an aspirin to remove the symptoms of the illness without attending to the cause.

According to this study, corporate programs designed to reduce managerial bias through education like diversity training had an overall negative impact: a 7 percent decline in the odds for black women to get managerial positions and an 8 percent decline in the odds for black men.

If a well-meaning effort to combat racism can have a negative impact, what do you think verbally attacking your political opponents of being racists would do? Let’s think about this before we further contribute to racism.

The fact that virtually all entertainers of all colors and creeds support the Democrats tells us how in touch they are with the American ideals. The fact that they lost the election despite all their emotional power tells us how out of touch they are with the American reality.

This election inspired me to reach out to people with a greater diversity of values; religious, political, national, regional, educational, socio-economic, professional, etc.. Our culture has been too focused on diversity in terms of how we look and has neglected our inner differences. We let “diversity” become a mere buzzword. Because we cannot see our values, we’ve conveniently excused our prejudices.

Through the Internet, we are able to create highly customized bubbles of our own. Our Facebook timelines are great representations of them. Each of our timelines is a unique bubble that caters to our needs and desires. We can judge the people outside of our bubbles all we want without the risk of being judged by them. This isolation, comfort, and safety magnify our fears about the world outside of our bubbles. Our tolerance for different values has weakened to an alarming level.

In our modern societies, the fear and anger towards the other will likely grow over time because of these technologies.

The best way to overcome our fear is to know more about it. “Ignorance” is not lack of knowledge—we cannot know everything—but judging without the willingness to know.

Ignorance permeated both sides of the political spectrum in this election. Both sides feared one another, yet made little to no effort to know one another. They let themselves be so overwhelmed with the fear of the other that they just shut down, and made no effort to reach out to the other side.

The political scientist interviewed in this article did the right thing. For about a decade, she traveled back and forth to rural towns in order to understand “why they feel the way they feel, why they vote the way they vote.” This article was published on Election Day before the result came out, but I think Trump’s victory lends further credibility to her theory.

There is a vast divide between the rural USA and the urban USA. We no longer understand one another. Ugly bigotry actually exists on both sides. The liberals are lucky because there is no shameful term like “racism” to label their own version. The closest word is perhaps “elitism.”

I don’t know why the media endorses presidential candidates. Once you publicly declare your position, you would naturally start defending your position. Gradually everything you say will be positional. Positional debates are not constructive.

I’m not saying that the media should not have an “editorial” department; in fact, I believe they should. There are theories, hypotheses, and speculations that cannot be backed up by facts. I think this is the hole that bloggers filled. I noticed this during the financial crisis of 2008. Because the news media were limited to reporting what can be backed up by facts and avoid making speculations, I turned to bloggers for more relevant information and their expert interpretations of what was happening.

Theories, hypotheses, and speculations do not have to be positional. The media could make their best guesses at what Henry Paulson was thinking during the crisis, and they wouldn’t be taking any sides. It’s still value-neutral. They could debate about the potential impact of Trump’s immigration policies without making a value judgment, simply speculate what they think will happen.

Speculation is often looked at as a bad thing but we all need to speculate to some degree to prepare ourselves for the future, and the media play an important role in that. They cannot provide just facts. Their audience also need structural frameworks to make their own judgment. Facts alone are not useful unless the reader is an expert on the subject. It’s like supplying random ingredients without teaching them the basic skills of cooking. But they don’t need to tell the readers that lasagna is better than ziti. Endorsing a presidential candidate is as absurd as declaring which religion is the best.

If they are going to claim that they are unbiased and objective, they need to do a much better job at being unbiased. Otherwise, they need to declare themselves to be a biased media outlet and state their bias up-front. It’s the pretense that’s harmful. In this election, I think we witnessed how harmful it is. The media was completely out of touch with the half of this country and mislead the country.